17-year-old Mikayla Nixon has only been into K-pop since 2018, but she's already sunk more than $7,000 into merchandise, much of it on her favourite band BTS.
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Cards, posters, CDs, clothes, figurines, pillows, calendars ...
In pop circles, fan is short for fanatic, and Mikayla fits squarely into this category.
Just like her mum, Carmen, who has been known to travel great distances to see performers such as Dolly Parton and Celine Dion.
"I moved to Coffs Harbour with my dad a couple of years ago and one of the friends I met up there liked BTS," Mikayla said.
K-pop (short for Korean pop) has been around for about 25 years and enjoys a vast following around the globe.
When BTS first performed in 2013 it was as a hip hop act, but they've since evolved musically.
"The members don't just sing, they dance, and in the groups you have rappers and singers and main dancers," said Mikayla, an Orange TAFE student. "It's more entertaining than, like, One Direction where they just sing."
BTS lyrics often address challenges faced by young people, and the group used its series of Love Yourself albums to work with UNICEF to campaign for the end of violence against children and young people.
Mikayla reckons she has about $2,000 worth of BTS CDs, even though she doesn't have a CD player.
"I can play them on my Xbox ... some albums are the same but they released three or four different versions, so I only play one of the CDs so I don't ruin the other ones."
Carmen Nixon joked that she'd been banned from playing Mikayla's CDs, lest anything happen to them.
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